Dispatches recounting the ambassador’s participation as an invited guest at court entertainment heightened the stakes of self-portrayal. His presence and positioning in the dancing hall were an index of his monarch’s “dignity” in the eyes of the host, a sign of estimation displayed for all the other courtiers and diplomats to see. After the entertainment was over, the ambassador’s account of the entertainment represented a second opportunity for performance as he portrayed himself in retrospective narrative as the perfect embodiment of his master’s prestige. The ambassador’s performance-as-spectator had ramifications both for the international status of his state and for his own professional esteem.
The significance of the diplomat’s role as spectator of court performances comes into relief in the texts documenting the diplomatic uproar caused by the failure of the English court to invite Le Fèvre de la Boderie to a masque—Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Beauty—organized by Queen Anna in the Carnival season of 1608. As recounted by Le Fèvre de la Boderie in his correspondence, the incident began in early January 1608 when an ally at the English court, the Duke of Lennox,42 warned him that the queen had invited the Spanish ambassador but not him to attend a performance of her new masque.43 This information was shocking because, at least since 1603, it had been customary at the English court to “feast” all the resident and extraordinary ambassadors during the Christmas and Carnival season, including inviting them to select performances of masques or revels.44 The news infuriated the French because through her choice of guests Queen Anna displayed a preference for Spain. The London masque hall had become another stage on which the fight for international precedence between the two countries could be played out.45
The consequences of the invitation affair unfolded over a yearlong period and took a toll on the morale and energy of its participants. Venetian ambassador Marc’ Antonio Correr reported in a February 20, 1609, dispatch that Queen Anna “says she is resolved to trouble herself no more with Masques.”46 Le Fèvre de la Boderie, for his part, was recalled to France soon after his attendance at the Masque of Queens.47 Viewed in the light of its prolonged effects, Anna’s action in excluding the French ambassador from The Masque of Beauty could be characterized as a “diplomatic incident.” Historian Lucien Bély usefully defines the diplomatic incident as an event that breaches the usually impenetrable barrier between diplomacy’s external ceremony and the secret play of diplomatic relationships and strategies,48 revealing the “underground tensions” that invisibly structure the day-to-day culture of diplomacy.49 This is certainly true of the incident surrounding Le Fèvre de la Boderie and the queen’s masques. In disrupting the normal diplomatic protocol and etiquette around entertainments at the English court (in which ambassadors were traditionally included on a routine basis), the event produced a spate of texts in which ambassadors, secretaries, and monarchs were forced to articulate the significance of court entertainment in relation to issues of prestige, visibility, and political reciprocity. The correspondence exposes a virtual space of preparation and planning that Goffman designates the “back region or backstage” of social performance: the space in which “illusions and impressions are openly constructed” and thus “the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course.”50 In this way, the incident and its aftermath disclosed the masque’s role in maintaining, representing, and publicizing international relationships.
Diplomatic correspondence relating to the invitation incident provides one source of insight into the importance of the masque as an arena for performing political relations. In his letters to Villeroy and Puisieux, Le Fèvre de la Boderie becomes both lead actor in and author of the drama he describes. He uses the first person liberally, focalizing events through his own limited perspective. Yet he also incorporates multiple perspectives through a dramatic narrativization of his encounters with various players in the incident. For example, the ambassador portrays himself first learning about the invitations from his friend and informant the Duke of Lennox, who relays the information by recounting a conversation between Anna and James: “The King remained somewhat astonished and responded to her only: but what will the French ambassador say about the Spanish ambassador being there while the French one is not?”51 Through the mouthpiece of Lennox, Le Fèvre de la Boderie attributed the diplomatic scandal to a domestic dispute between the king and queen. The irrational, hispanophilic queen caused the problem; the king supported the French. In the ambassador’s telling, this version gained credence a few days later, when the king proposed a private dinner and entertainment for the French ambassador as recompense for his exclusion from the masque. In correspondence to his masters back in France, Le Fèvre de la Boderie supposed that James’s failure to stand up to his wife illustrated Anna’s power over him and thus displayed his weakness as both a husband and a king.52
The French ambassador’s portrayal of the incident as a domestic matter appears strategic. It certainly stands in contrast to the interpretation provided by his diplomatic peers. Venetian ambassador Zorzi Giustinian, for example, emphasized the political motivations for French and English actions. He described the French ambassador’s offense as related to “this undecided question of precedence.”53 Meanwhile, his dispatches from that January suggest covert political agendas that might explain the dis-invitation. As he noted in a relation to the Venetian senate, the English were trying to engineer an alliance with Spain, sealed through a marriage of Prince Charles to the Infanta.54 As was characteristic for Venetian ambassadors, Giustinian depicts himself through these interpretations as a skilled analyst of the political scene, providing rich context and a broad angle from which his vicarious audience in the senate could view and interpret events. In contrast, Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s mapping of the political onto the domestic may be read as a (conscious or unconscious) interpretive strategy to negate the suspicion that any deeper political cause—or any fault of his own—lay at the root of his non-invitation. He cast himself as wronged victim of Anna’s caprice and James’s weakness.
The ambassador’s emphasis on the conjugal nature of the dispute also calls attention to the importance of both public and private stages for diplomatic representation. Ambassadors’ deductions about the emotional and affective life of the sovereign had an important place in diplomatic practice. As Lucien Bély notes, “In political systems where power was incarnated by men and women chosen by God—hereditary monarchy—it was above all necessary to be informed as to their personality, health, and will.”55 Part of diplomats’ task as “honorable spies” was to hunt for clues about the sovereign’s state of mind and relationships. No clear boundary divided personal from political relationships.
Yet ambassadors’ writings show that an important distinction remained between public and private representation of those relationships. Diplomats’ understanding of this distinction is illustrated by Le Fèvre de la Boderie’s reaction to James’s proposal to hold a private dinner for the French ambassador as a way to compensate him for missing the ballet. Le Fèvre de la Boderie protested: “There was no proportion between a dinner the King would give me and the honor the ambassador would receive by intervention in the ballet; for one is a private action, and the other a spectacle and public solemnity…. All the spectators would be the judges of this action and would publish it throughout the whole of Christendom.”56
The key difference between a “private action” (une action privée) and a “public solemnity” (une solemnité publique) pertains to the question of who is watching. James offered the private dinner to reassure the French ambassador of his personal commitment to their relationship and to the